Sunday, December 9, 2012

Spectrum Mock Kickoff 2012-13

Spectrum hosted the inaugural Houston Area Mock Kickoff this Saturday (Dec 8th, 2012) at St. Agnes Academy. The event is modeled after events that take place in Michigan by Code Red Robotics and Minnesota by MNGoFIRST. The goal of these events is to introduce new teams and new students to FRC and how the design process works. Much of what we went over at our event was the Engineering Design Process, much of it similar to how John V-Neun presented it in this paper.

We had a fantastic turnout to this year's event. We had over 130 people in attendance representing 13 teams. We were very happy to welcome all four of the Houston area rookie teams to this event. 4587, 4589, 4639, and 4689 welcome to FRC we're all very glad to have you.

For the main event of the day we had everyone in the cafeteria. We split up the real teams in to about 20 Mock Teams for the day. That way people were working with people that they didn't know and hopefully they made a few friends during the day. We then went over what happens at Kickoff and also the entire design process.

We also had 5 workshops choices after our main design workshop. We had an introduction to the electrical system, the mechanical system, How to run an FRC team, Using media to help FRC teams, and we also hosted our Java Beta Test open house during this time. Thank you to Scott Rippetoe (#1477), Kevin Sevcik (#57), Judy Bryant (#57), and Andrew Lynch (#2587) for helping with these presentations.

All of the documents that we handed out at this event can be found on our website. www.spectrum3847.org/mockkickoff. One of the newest things we have is our updated version of our Illuminations documentfor rookie teams. Please take a look it at; we really think it will help new teams.

Thank you to everyone that helped with event, all the participants, and everyone who has posted resources for teams to use.

- Spectrum

"Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee, and do not try to make the universe a blind alley."